Angela Lansbury on screen and stage

British and American actress Angela Lansbury was known for her prolific work in theatre, film, and television.

Lansbury (left) with her mother, Moyna Macgill, on the set of Kind Lady (1951).

This article is part of a series about Angela Lansbury
Filmography Awards Gallery Quotes Jessica Fletcher Mrs. Potts

Lansbury's career spanned nine decades.[1] She made her film debut in Gaslight (1944),[2] and followed it up with an appearance in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945).[3] She earned two consecutive Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress, and won the Supporting Actress Golden Globe for the latter film.[4] Subsequent films throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s included National Velvet (1944),[1] The Harvey Girls (1946),[5] State of the Union (1948),[1] Kind Lady (1951), The Court Jester (1956), and The Long, Hot Summer (1958).

She drifted towards more complex, mature work with The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), All Fall Down (1962), In the Cool of the Day (1963), Dear Heart (1964); and, in one of her most infamous roles, as the Machiavellian Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). For the latter, she received stellar reviews, winning a second Golden Globe and earning her third Oscar nomination.

Meanwhile, Lansbury also found success on stage. She starred on Broadway in A Taste of Honey, Stephen Sondheim's Anyone Can Whistle, and later on as Anna Leonowens in The King and I. But that time with Sondheim began a collaborative partnership that would garner them both frequent success. Together, they also worked on Mame, the Broadway revival of Gypsy, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. And for those three successful hits (plus one considered a flop, for which she was nonetheless praised, Dear World;[6] albeit not by Sondheim), Lansbury won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical an unprecedented, and undefeated, four times.

Intermittently, she returned to do films, appearing in the dark comedy, Something for Everyone (1970). The following year, she starred in Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). She earned Best Comedy/Musical Actress Golden Globe nominations for both roles. For the Hercule Poirot yarn, Death on the Nile (1978), she won the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress and earned a BAFTA nomination as well. She portrayed Miss Marple two years later in another Agatha Christie tale, The Mirror Crack'd (1980), earning a Saturn Award nom.

In the 1980s, she began to direct her efforts towards television. She earned her first Primetime Emmy nomination alongside Bette Davis, both for the miniseries Little Gloria...Happy at Last (1982). However, it would be her iconic role as mystery author Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote (1984-1996) which would immortalize her with a whole new generation. She starred in every episode for twelve seasons, and received an Emmy nomination for each of them, although she never won. She did win four more Golden Globe Awards, however, for Best Actress in a TV Drama Series, bringing her grand total to six. In total, she received eighteen unsuccessful Emmy bids, rendering her the most nominated individual performer never to win that award.

Lansbury lent her talents as a voice actress to Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991) as Mrs. Potts, who sang the titular song in the film, as well as Anastasia (1997). She acted sporadically throughout various films, TV shows, and stage productions throughout the next two and a half decades, including playing the wicked Great Aunt Adelaide in Emma Thompson's Nanny McPhee (2005). She made a return to the stage opposite Marian Seldes in Deuce, and received her fifth nomination. She earned a sixth nomination for Blithe Spirit and won her fifth Tony as a result. Lansbury earned a seventh and final nomination for A Little Night Music, at the following year's ceremony. For her distinguished career, she has been presented with several honorary tributes, including the Honorary Academy Award and a Special Tony Award, plus damehood from Queen Elizabeth II. Lansbury's final role was a cameo as herself in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022), which was released posthumously, shortly after her death.